


Hand in Glove

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Songs of Experience [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Post-Fall Shenanigans, Post-Finale, Vague Intimations of UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:47:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6143443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will could almost miss the tightening of Hannibal’s hand on his jaw or the slight catch of his breath.  Almost, but not quite.  Not when they’re this close together. But all Hannibal says is, “Hush, Will.  Let me work.”  Will hushes.  He supposes there will be time, later, to work out just what he’d meant, and what Hannibal had understood.</p><p>He breathes, and he drifts, and he lets the moment be just what it is.  A little space of gentleness, after the carnage and before the flight.  Somewhere, he supposes, there are search teams and sirens.  Somewhere there’s normality. Somewhere there’s Molly, and he knows that thought will hurt later, but it doesn’t right now, in this little bubble of temporary peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand in Glove

_Hand in glove_

_We can go wherever we please_

_And everything depends upon_

_How near you stand to me_

_And if the people stare, then the people stare_

_Oh, I really don’t know and I really don’t care_

_~ The Smiths, "Hand in Glove"_

* * *

 

Will barely remembers, then or ever, how they survive the ocean. He vaguely remembers vomiting up what felt like half the ocean’s worth of salt water, and he remembers tight fiery bands of pain around his chest the entire time, making him nearly sob with each heave. _Cracked r_ _ib_ , he’d thought. _We’ll have to do something about that._

He does remember that thought, but it’s only days later with the clarity of passing time that he can look back and name that as the moment he decided to live. Or as the moment he’d accepted without even thinking about it that there was now a “we” to be considered.  A “we” who would be living, and therefore need medical attention.

They stumble up the winding, half-hidden, overgrown path back to the clifftop, weaving and clutching at each other like drunks.  Which perhaps they are. Drunk on a mind-altering brew of blood and starlight, pain and adrenaline, and a silent understanding that touch is to be allowed now between them. There are no more barriers, glass or otherwise.  How could there be, after this?

Hannibal has a small arsenal of medical supplies. Of course he does. It’s enough to stanch and treat the worst of the wounds, the ones that might end in one or both of them bleeding out before they can get somewhere safe.  

Will doesn’t blink at stripping out of his shirt; it’s a sodden shredded rag at this point anyway.  He doesn’t blink - okay, maybe he blinks once, but only once - at Hannibal doing the same.  The man’s barely upright with the amount of blood he’s lost, it’s not a time for propriety or for comparing what he thought Hannibal would look like shirtless to how he actually looks, or even for letting himself think about the fact that he has in fact been carrying around a prediction about exactly that.

He doesn’t blink at a damn thing that’s happened since he got into the car with Hannibal, right up until the moment Hannibal reaches to snap on a pair of latex gloves, and then Will just loses his shit.

The laughter that rips out of him hurts like hell, it feels like exactly that - _ripped_ , bloody and jagged, straight from somewhere inside him.  Every peal of laughter causes a sharp stab of pain that makes him want to stop. But then he looks up again and there’s Hannibal, shirtless and blood-drenched and soaked to the bone, pale with blood loss and three years without sunlight, somehow still trying to be a doctor, prim and proper with his gloves as if there’s anything sterile about any of this. As if he hadn’t ripped a man’s throat out with his teeth an hour earlier.  Suddenly it’s the funniest thing Will’s ever seen.

Maybe he’s going into shock.  That’s also a distinct possibility. It may very well be that the last tenuous thread of Will’s sanity has snapped. It shouldn’t, oh it really shouldn’t, be this funny. But he’s staring at Hannibal’s gloves and he’s looking at the muddy bloody footprints they’ve tracked through the house, and Francis Dolarhyde is lying in a congealing pool of his own blood a few dozen feet away, and Will is fiercely and improbably happy to be alive, and he just can’t stop laughing about the whole disaster.

Hannibal stares at him in that slightly blank way he has, seems to determine after a long moment that Will’s current state of semi-hysteria is beyond him in his weakened condition, and turns to his own injuries. He cleans and binds what he can manage on his own, and Will tries to get a grip on himself because he knows he’ll be needed soon for the rest. He tries to focus.

He manages to gulp down a few lungfuls of air and finally to slow his laughter enough to be of some use when Hannibal needs him.  He washes his hands as directed, watching the water swirl reddened down the drain.  He takes another pair of gloves at Hannibal’s direction and bites his lip hard enough to keep from laughing again.

He puts them on and tends to Hannibal’s back, cleaning and bandaging the worst of the wounds as carefully as he can.  It’s only then, with the sobering experience of Hannibal right under his hands, preternaturally still but certainly in pain, that Will can find words for some of what’s in his mind.

“The gloves,” he finally manages to say.  “We’re both covered in god knows what, and you’re still acting like a surgeon.”

Hannibal’s closed eyes are the only hint that he’s feeling anything as Will’s hands move across his skin.  He says mildly, “I never stopped being a surgeon. Or a psychiatrist. The license and the operating room privileges can be taken away but the habits remain.”

“Like the ambulance.”  Will didn’t quite realize he had that image in his head until he said it. “With Devon Silvestri.”

There; the tiny flicker of a muscle in Hannibal’s cheek that would be a smile on anyone else. Will catches it in the bathroom mirror. “It was unwise to let you see me that way. I may have been showing off a little.”

“So early on?” Will presses gauze into place and reaches for the bandage to begin to wind it around Hannibal’s torso. He winces as the movement pulls at his own injuries.  

“That early and earlier.” Hannibal hisses just a little as the bandage pulls tight.

That's too many things to process at once; it’s a little like drowning all over again, on dry land.  Will finishes his work in silence and then steps back for Hannibal to survey his own torso. He tries not to be pleased when Hannibal murmurs, “That will hold nicely for the time being. Thank you, Will.”

He sounds grave and formal and genuinely grateful, as if Will hadn’t just tried to kill them both.  He beckons Will forward for his own turn and reaches for a new pair of gloves, and Will manages not to laugh this time.  He manages mostly because it hurts, when Hannibal starts to prod at his injuries to assess how deep the knife went.

Will closes his eyes and tries to think of somewhere else to be. Already primed for it, his mind takes him back to the organ harvester. He stands outside in the darkness and watches Hannibal peel off his jacket and roll up a shirtsleeve and reach a gloved hand inside the man on the gurney with a casual practiced ease. _Like he does it all the time_ , he had marveled then.

Some part of him had known then, he supposes. Had realized with the low rolling menace of an approaching thunderstorm that the flip side of healing is hurting and that Hannibal had been far too at ease. That he’d been too interested in Will’s reaction to his heroics and not in actually saving the life in front of him. And looking back, perhaps that twisting sensation in Will's stomach hadn’t been nausea or relief or anything so straightforward as that. Perhaps it had been a realization that Will himself didn’t care nearly as much about the life being saved as he should, either. That he suddenly had questions about Hannibal, personal questions to be asked outside the bounds of a therapy session. A personal _interest_.

Hannibal’s hands are gentler now, less prodding, more cleaning off blood and muck and God knows what else from Will’s shoulder.

Will tries to drift and not feel it too much. He thinks back to standing in Hannibal’s kitchen, awkwardly twisting a wine bottle around in his hands. Asking personal questions. Tiptoeing past a boundary he had sensed, without explicitly admitting as much even to himself, had been erased the moment Hannibal met Will’s eyes with a man’s living kidney in his hand. The moment when neither of them had cared, at all, about that man’s life. Maybe the rest of it, even this moment, had all flowed from that one.

“I can’t remember his name,” Will hears himself say distantly, the words thick on his tongue from the blood in his mouth.

“Hm?” Hannibal sounds distracted. Will knows, in the way that he knows things about Hannibal now, that it’s not the caretaking that’s distracting him, but the proximity.

“The man who didn’t die, because you wanted to impress me. I don’t even remember his name. Feels like I should.” Will drags his eyes open again as Hannibal finishes up with his shoulder. “Do you remember?”

His cheek is the only other wound dire enough to need immediate attention before they can run. Hannibal leans in closer to look at it. There’s blood in his hair and something about that makes Will forget to breathe.  

“I don’t think I ever bothered to learn his name. It wasn’t the point.” Will can feel Hannibal’s breath carrying the words across his skin. “I think I should stitch this one before we go. May I?”

The politeness of the question is almost enough to set Will laughing again, except he feels precariously balanced on the edge of something big, a chasm much scarier and higher up than the cliff. He nods.

“Where should we go?” he asks, while Hannibal rummages in his supplies for needle and thread and, Will hopes like hell, Lidocaine. “If you don’t already have a plan, I vote somewhere warm. I feel like I’ve been cold forever.”

Hannibal returns with some sort of numbing spray and begins to tend to Will again. “Wherever we please,” he says distractedly. “With a few exceptions for places it would be unwise for us to surface. Out of the country for a while, I think.”

There’s a moment, then. Will’s face slowly going numb and Hannibal waiting for it, so as not to cause pain. The light stroke of a gloved thumb over Will’s cheek, the sensation slowly fading until Will can’t feel the heat of it but only the pressure, and then that too fades to almost nothing at all.  When it’s gone, he wants it back.

He’s going to have to shut up in a minute, or risk getting a needle through the tongue. But it seems important to ask first, so he does: “Are you always going to be this careful when you touch me now?”

Hannibal blinks at him, seeming for a moment just as off balance, just as poised for another fall as Will feels. But all he says is, “That depends upon you, I think. Hold still, now. Don’t pull away.”

Will can’t feel the stitches go in, not really. He doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t talk, and he doesn’t really think. He just goes still under Hannibal’s hands, the surgeon’s hands that performed for him elbow-deep inside the body of a man whose name they’ve both forgotten. He thinks vaguely about going somewhere warm. He wonders if people will stare at the scar he’ll surely have. He wonders if he’ll care, later; right now there’s nothing in the world he cares about outside this room.

Somewhere outside the wind is rising; he can hear it blowing in through the shattered window. They’ll have to leave soon.

Not just yet. He holds still and steady and waits for sensation to return.  There are a lot of new things to feel and he wants to be aware of all of them.  He waits for a moment when Hannibal’s needle is safely away from his skin and then moves just enough to say, “Don’t be _too_ careful with me.”

He could almost miss the tightening of Hannibal’s hand on his jaw or the slight catch of his breath.  Almost, but not quite.  Not when they’re this close together. But all Hannibal says is, “Hush, Will.  Let me work.”

Will hushes.  He supposes there will be time, later, to work out just what he’d meant by that, and what Hannibal had understood.

He breathes, and he drifts, and he lets the moment be just what it is.  A little space of gentleness, after the carnage and before the flight.  Somewhere, he supposes, there are search teams and sirens.  Somewhere there’s normality. Somewhere there’s Molly, and he knows that thought will hurt later, but it doesn’t right now, in this little bubble of temporary peace.

He’s vaguely aware that Hannibal’s finished working on him, but he doesn’t open his eyes until Hannibal says, “All right. You can talk now.”

Will opens his eyes then but finds he doesn’t actually have anything else to say. He tests his cheek tentatively, working his jaw to find there’s still a little spark of pain but it’s muted now.  Better, under Hannibal’s care.  He wants to smile but he’s pretty sure that would hurt more, so instead he just says, “I’m going to need to borrow a shirt, and then let’s get out of here.  Okay?”

Hannibal strips off his gloves and reaches out a hand to take Will’s.  It’s a casual gesture with an entirely un-casual intent behind it.  Will takes the offered hand and everything it implies, and they leave the bubble in search of dry clothing, and whatever escape routes are open to them, and whatever comes next.

**Author's Note:**

> Although this one is prompted fic from someone who wanted me to write something based on the song "Hand in Glove," I'm making it a standalone instead of dropping it into the prompt compilation. I am eyeing down a few other prompts in my inbox, and I feel like they might end up stringing together into a little self-contained universe following from this one. So, standalone for now, possibly to become a little mini-series. Stay tuned. Come yell at me in the comments or [over on Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com) if you want to discuss the possibilities.


End file.
